For thousands of years, the appearance of a comet in the terrestrial
skies has provoked deep anxiety and even collective hysteria in humans
the world over. The reasons for this response are not entirely clear.
Working with historical testimony, David Talbott and his colleagues have
concluded that comet fears originated in a global experience of
catastrophe and terror. Behind all of the regional traditions and
stories is the memory of the "Great Comet," the mother of all comets.
The memory traces to the origins of world mythology, according to
Talbott, and is particularly vivid in the story of a cosmic serpent or
dragon threatening to destroy the world. The most common ancient ideas
attached to a comet were the death of kings, the fall of kingdoms,
cosmic upheaval, and the end of the world.

It is well worth asking why this collective anxiety can be provoked with
the first appearance of a mere wisp of gas in the heavens. The question
is especially appropriate today because of the approach of the Comet
Elenin, which is predicted to pass within about 0.233 AU of the Earth in
October of this year. Speculations about Elenin
range from a theoretical NASA coverup of an "extinction level event,"
to theories that the comet is actually the ever-elusive planet "Nibiru"
of author Zecharia Sitchin's lore. (For a thoughtful meditation on the
credibility of some of these theories, see the Subversify.com piece, "Is Google Censoring Nibiru?").
It should be noted here that the leading proponent of the electric
universe, Wal Thornhill, has refrained from predicting specific
behaviors of Elenin due to the number of unknowns. These unknowns
(discussed below) include the Sun's activity, and the constituent
material of the comet itself.

One can understand the frustration NASA likely feels
when witnessing the carnival of theories surrounding space science news
stories today. However, NASA must surely bear some of the
responsibility for the evident mistrust and even anger so often
expressed toward the agency. On the issue of comets NASA has never
acknowledged the failures of the standard theory. We are still
told that comets are "dirty snowballs" that formed billions of years ago
in a theoretical "Oort cloud." The idea makes no sense and has been
repeatedly falsified by the observed behaviors of comets. Silence on
such matters is not helpful. When the institutions of science choose a
path of denial on controversial matters, rightly or wrongly it can only
fuel perceptions of secrecy and suppression.

At least 25 states in the US now mandate at least one formal assessment during kindergarten, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Such a fact speaks directly to a growing (and for many, a
troubling) trend of high-stakes early childhood testing taking root
across the country.
Driven by corporate school reformers and incentived by Obama's "Race to the Top" education policy, the
drive to push standardized testing to the lowest grade levels is met
with cheers by testing companies like ACT Inc., who stand to profit
greatly from such measures.

Opponents, however, told Reuters that the trend was hugely troubling
and that adults—especially ones who claim educational expertise—"should
know better".

Formal tests give a narrow picture of a
child's ability, said Samuel Meisels, president of the Erikson
Institute, a graduate school in Chicago focused on child development. He
urges teachers instead to assess young children by observing them over
time, recording skills and deficits and comparing those to benchmarks.

But Meisels fears such observational tests
won't seem objective or precise enough in today's data-driven world; he
says he too often sees them pushed aside in favor of more formal
assessments.

"I am worried, yes," he said. "We should know better."

Kari Knutson, a veteran kindergarten teacher
in Minnesota, has seen the shifting attitude toward testing play out in
her classroom.

During her first two decades of teaching,
Knutson rarely, if ever, gave formal tests; kindergarten was about
learning through play, music, art and physical activity.

These days, though, her district mandates a long list of assessments.

Knutson started the year by quizzing each of
her 23 students on the alphabet and phonics, through a 111-question oral
exam. Last week, she brought the kids to the computer lab for another
literacy test. Each kindergartener wore headphones and listened to
questions while a menu of possible answers flashed on the screen. They
were supposed to respond by clicking on the correct answer, though not
all could maneuver the mouse and some gave up in frustration, Knutson
said.

This week, it's on to math - and a seven-page,
pencil-and-paper test. "It's supposed to show them what they'll be
learning in first grade," Knutson said. "Like they really care."

In her view, the kids are far too young to
tackle formal exams, especially in their first weeks of what is for many
their first school experience. "Half of them are crying because they
miss mom and dad. When you tell them to line up, they don't even know
what a line is," Knutson said.

Friday, September 21, 2012

If you had any doubt that the ongoing coup by
bankers and their allies was proceeding apace, the latest story from
Shahien Nasiripour of the Financial Times should settle all doubts.

The pink paper reports that Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, the FHFA, plans to punish
impose surcharges on borrowers in states like New York because
foreclosures take longer there. This is the excuse, erm, rationale:

US
borrowers in states where home foreclosures are costly and
time-consuming will have to pay more for their mortgages, the top
housing regulator has proposed.

Lenders originating new loans in
New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida and Connecticut will be forced
to pay US-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac up to 30
basis points extra for their credit guarantee, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in its proposal.

The
fee would probably be passed on to borrowers. The agency said the
surcharge would compensate for the increased cost of repossessing homes
in the five states, costs ultimately borne by US taxpayers.

And the FHFA was open in that its aim was to put state law on its Procrustean bed:

“If
those states were to adjust their laws and requirements sufficiently to
move their foreclosure timelines and costs more in line with the
national average . . . the fees imposed under the planned approach would
be lowered or eliminated,” the FHFA said.

Now the
reality, of course, is more complicated. The two mortgage insurers have
refused to crack down on foreclosure mills despite overwhelming evidence
of their failure to comply with long-established state law
requirements. When the robosigning scandal broke, many judges in
judicial foreclosure states started taking borrower challenges to
servicer standing more seriously. New York’s courts instituted a
requirement that lawyers submitting documents in foreclosures certify
that they had taken reasonable steps to certify their accuracy. This
might sound like a belt-and-suspenders requirement, but from a
procedural standpoint, it made it easier for borrower’s counsel to seek
sanctions if he though the bank’s attorney was playing
fast and loose. And indeed, as we’ve documented, foreclosures ground to
a near halt after the certification requirement was instituted.

Conversely,
in Florida, the idea that protracted foreclosure times are the product
of overly cumbersome court requirements is largely a crock. We’ve been
reporting for well over a year that delays in foreclosures in Florida
are driven almost entirely by the bank/servicer counsel repeatedly
putting off court dates, to the point where judges are annoyed and
frustrated. It appears a big driver, if not the big driver, is the
depressed state of the housing market. Even with the recent wave of
bottom-fishing, servicers seem to want to attenuate the foreclosure
process to keep borrowers in homes, which both reduces their maintenance
costs and keeps too many foreclosed homes from either being held in
inventory a long time (which leads to deterioration in value) or put on
the market at once (depressing prices).

What this is really about
is a further push to try to achieve national standards, even though real
estate or “dirt law” has long been treated by the Supreme Court as a
state law matter. So the power of the GSE is being used to pressure
state legislatures to join a legal race to the bottom. If state bar
associations had instead players their proper role and had disbarred
foreclosure mill attorneys, Fannie and Freddie would have been forced to
clean up their act on foreclosure processes and the FHFA would not have
found it as worthwhile to try to implement this sort of extortion.

I’m
not holding my breath, but the GSE haters also tend to be in favor of
state’s rights, so it might be possible to craft an alliance between
some of the Fannie and Freddie opponents and borrower advocates on the
need for the primacy of the rule of law. Congressman Brad Miller minced
no words:

It is hard to see this as anything other
than bullying states that are protecting homeowners from foreclosure
abuses. FHFA has no business holding a state’s new mortgage market
hostage to extort weaker homeowner protections for existing mortgages.

This effort to perpetuate bad practices by the GSEs by blaming states needs to be called out and firmly opposed.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

More than 70 percent of Earth is covered in water, and the oceans remain
some of the most mysterious parts of our world. According to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 95 percent of what lies
underwater has not ever been seen by humans. NASA confirms that humans
have better maps of the surface of Mars than of the bottom of the sea.

Earlier this year, off the southern coast of Japan, Yoji Ookata,
a deep-sea photographer and diver who has been documenting the deep sea
for more than 50 years, saw something he had never observed before. A
circular pattern of rippling sand about 80 feet below sea level and 6
feet in diameter was on the ocean floor. Ookata returned to the same
spot with a TV camera crew in tow to capture the discovery and figure
out who or what had created its intricate design.

Ookata dubbed his new find the "mystery circle"
and was shocked to find out that a single puffer fish, no more than a
few inches long, had created the circles using just one fin. The tiny
fish works tirelessly day and night to complete the design. While the
circled sculpture is beautiful to look at, Ookata and his crew learned
that the fish's creation maintained a dual purpose. Female fish are
attracted to the ridges and valleys left in the sand, and they deposit
their eggs in the center. The eggs are then shielded from the ocean
currents, as the higher points of the sculpture create a barrier to
protect them. The more ridges a sculpture contains, the more likely it
will attract the females of the species.

This discovery really just scratches the surface of knowledge about the
ocean. The rest of the 95 percent still awaits exploration.

Atlantis is a legendary "lost" island subcontinent often idealized as an
advanced, utopian society holding wisdom that could bring world peace.
The idea of Atlantis has captivated dreamers, occultists, and New Agers
for generations.

In the 1800s, mystic Madame Blavatsky claimed that she learned about
Atlantis from Tibetan gurus; a century later, psychic Edgar Cayce
claimed that Atlantis (which he described as an ancient, highly evolved
civilization powered by crystals) would be discovered by 1969.

In the 1980s, New Age mystic J.Z. Knight claimed that she learned about
Atlantis from Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit who speaks
through her. Thousands of books, magazines and websites are devoted to
Atlantis, and it remains a popular topic.

The origins of Atlantis

Unlike many legends whose origins have been lost in the mists of time,
we know exactly when and where the story of Atlantis first appeared. The
story was first told in two of Plato's dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, written about 330 B.C.

Though today Atlantis is often conceived of as a peaceful utopia, the
Atlantis that Plato described in his fable was very different. In his
book Frauds, Myths and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, professor of archaeology Ken Feder summarizes the story:

"a technologically sophisticated but morally bankrupt evil empire -
Atlantis - attempts world domination by force. The only thing standing
in its way is a relatively small group of spiritually pure, morally
principled, and incorruptible people - the ancient Athenians.

Overcoming overwhelming odds ... the Athenians are able to defeat their
far more powerful adversary simply through the force of their spirit.
Sound familiar? Plato's Atlantean dialogues are essentially an ancient
Greek version of Star Wars."

As propaganda, the Atlantis legend is more about the heroic Athens than a
sunken civilization; if Atlantis really existed today and was found,
its residents would probably try to kill and enslave us all.

It's clear that Plato made up Atlantis as a plot device for his stories
because there no other records of it anywhere else in the world. There
are many extant Greek texts; surely someone else would have also
mentioned, at least in passing, such a remarkable place. There is simply
no evidence from any source that the legends about Atlantis existed before Plato wrote about it.

The 'lost' continent

Despite its clear origin in fiction, many people over the centuries have
claimed that there must be some truth behind the myths, speculating
about where Atlantis would be found.
Countless Atlantis "experts" have located the lost continent all around
the world based on the same set of facts. Candidates - each
accompanied by their own peculiar sets of evidence and arguments -
include the Atlantic Ocean, Antarctica, Bolivia, Turkey, Germany, Malta
and the Caribbean.

Plato, however, is crystal clear about where Atlantis is: "For the ocean
there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you
Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' (i.e., Hercules)
there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together." In
other word it lies in the Atlantic Ocean beyond "the pillars of
Hercules" (i.e., the Straits of Gibraltar, at the mouth of the
Mediterranean). Yet it has never been found in the Atlantic, or anywhere
else.

No trace of Atlantis has ever been found despite advances in
oceanography and ocean floor mapping in past decades. For nearly two
millennia readers could be forgiven for suspecting that the vast depths
might somehow hide a sunken city or continent. Though there remains much
mystery at the bottom of the world's oceans, it is inconceivable that
the world's oceanographers, submariners, and deep-sea probes have some
how missed a landmass "larger than Libya and Asia together."

Furthermore plate tectonics demonstrate that Atlantis is impossible; as
the continents have drifted, the seafloor has spread over time, not
contracted. There would simply be no place for Atlantis to sink into. As
Ken Feder notes, "The geology is clear; there could have been no large
land surface that then sank in the area where Plato places Atlantis.
Together, modern archaeology and geology provide an unambiguous verdict:
There was no Atlantic continent; there was no great civilization called
Atlantis."

Myth from misinterpretation

The only way to make a mystery out of Atlantis (and to assume that it
was once a real place) is to ignore its obvious origins as a moral fable
and to change the details of Plato's story, claiming that he took
license with the truth, either out of error or intent to deceive. With
the addition, omission, or misinterpretation of various details in
Plato's work, nearly any proposed location can be made to "fit" his
description.

Yet as writer L. Sprague de Camp noted in his book Lost Continents,
"You cannot change all the details of Plato's story and still claim to
have Plato's story. That is like saying the legendary King Arthur is
'really' Cleopatra; all you have to do is to change Cleopatra's sex,
nationality, period, temperament, moral character, and other details,
and the resemblance becomes obvious."

The Atlantis legend has been kept alive, fueled by the public's
imagination and fascination with the idea of a hidden, long-lost utopia.
Yet the "lost city of Atlantis" was never lost; it is where it always
was: in Plato's books.

Comment: This is an excellent little article which sets up the fact that Atlantis may be more accurately defined as the word academic. Think about it.
It was the theophanic descriptive for Plato's preface which became a euphemism Atlantis. It seems to have worked to some degree.

Aesop tells the story of the North Wind and the Sun: who is the
stronger? They chose a traveler to test their strength; which of the two
could force him to remove his cloak. The North Wind went first,
whirling furiously down on the traveler, whipping his cloak to wrest it
from him; but the more furiously he whirled, the more securely the man
wrapped himself in his cloak.

The Sun abided his time and smiled gently at the traveler, gradually
warming the air and surrounding the traveler with warmth and gentleness.
Before he had gone many steps, he was glad to throw off his cloak and
walk lightly clad among his brethren. The moral: Persuasion is better
than force.

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said the United
States had forfeited its moral right to stop Israel taking action
against Iran's nuclear program because it had refused to be firm with
Tehran itself." (Newsmax.com, Tuesday, September 11, 2012).

Curiously and perhaps ironically, Netanyahu claimed, "The world tells
Israel, 'Wait, there's still time'. And I say, 'Wait for what? Wait
until when?'"

And the world might well respond, "When Israel decides to join the world
community in a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, and places itself
in the same position as all mid-eastern states, bereft of weapons of
mass destruction, standing with all other nations as free states, free
of its military totalitarianism, free to join its neighbors beyond the
walls of isolation it has erected to maintain its tribal nature living
in constant fear of its true mid-eastern lineage.

It might find that the communities of the world would find Israel's
willingness to abide by international law and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights justification to join that state as a friend worthy of
world-wide acceptance into the United Nations, not a rogue state
sustained by the impunity provided by the unequivocal backing of the US.

What moral right does Netanyahu refer to when his
state has been operating without morals for 63 years? How strange, yet
frighteningly real it is that a person's life can be tracked by madness
inflicted by one on utter strangers or on innocents made enemies to
further the madness. When I was four Mahatma Ghandi penned this note:
"It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who
can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage stage. Must
you pay the price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to
be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has seliberately shunned
the method of war not without considerable success?" ("Letter to Herr
Hitler," 1939).

Today there is no Ghandi to pen such a note to Mister Netanyahu as he
thrashes about to launch an invasion against his perceived enemy, the
state of Iran. His madness is manifest in his deafness to his own
contradictions: his moral right to destroy the industrial development of
a sister state; his moral right to impose his judgment and his will on
the citizens of that state who have done nothing to the citizens of
Israel; his moral right to impose his sickness on his fellow Jews
despite their pleadings that he does not speak for them; his moral
determination that his state has moral rights to the very weapons he'd
deny to his neighbors; his moral contempt for the perspectives of Russia
and China and Brazil and 117 other nations that declared their
objection to his idiocy at the NAM conference held just two weeks ago in
Tehran; and, perhaps most glaringly to a citizen of the U.S., his moral
condemnation of the President of the United States who has groveled
with the best of our Congressional hoard before the altar of AIPAC to
declare unequivocal allegiance to this state that has no loyalty to its
Golem, just scorn for its weakness, lack of self-esteem and its
acceptance of the disgraceful humiliation showered on it by that very
state. That is the madness of one who has crowned himself with glory,
lifted himself to the pinnacle of self-righteous power, bathed in the
adulations of the fanatical hoards that chant his praises in our House
of Representatives, and praised the evangelical Zionists that bow before
him as they urge him to fulfill the Armageddon promised their sick
minds in the book of Revelation.

How sad. Centuries ago, over 2500 to be precise, Aesop penned fables,
brief but telling tales of the human condition told in simple
narratives, easily understood - even by the least of our intellectual
brethren, even by an idiot - that conveyed a moral. The tale of the
North Wind and the Sun, the one that began this piece, conveys a simple
reality of human history: the future of humankind depends on its
kindness to all, its sensitiveness to the plight of others, its desire
to aid those in distress, its awareness of the thinking that binds
people together and a corresponding awareness to tolerate divergent
thought, its hope and dreams for all who live and all who will inherit
this earth, its absolute commitment to compassion, to caring, to sharing
that all may live and love and know they too are equal to all others,
bound in loving kindness that all may dream and live in peace.

That is a moral Netanyahu might consider as he thumps his way from
podium to podium damning the Iranians, damning those who will not follow
his madness, proclaiming his G-d given right to blast the Iranians from
the face of the earth, to slaughter their soldiers, destroy their
villages and towns, turn their rivers into streams of flowing blood,
slaughtering their people because they dare to oppose his rule as though
he ruled the earth even though he is PM of six million in a state the
size of Rhode Island, but of such importance it must be the voice of
all, or so he believes. If it were not that the Congressmen of this
nation, the United States, might listen to his madness, this might be
laughable. But that's not the case.

So instead, what if the Israeli State were to take the high moral road
built on true morals - to love one another, to love even your enemy, to
love as you would be loved - to sit down with the Iranian people, to
meet them as equals, to attempt to comprehend how two divergent peoples
held at bay these many decades could understand each other, to negotiate
an end to verbal hostilities and through dialogue and warmth and
gentleness embrace each other that all might live to enjoy today and
tomorrow, and forever, together.

Thus might the creative and constructive power of persuasion from both
sides overcome the derisive anger and destructive power of force. May we
let our ancient ancestors speak for us in lieu of Ghandi.

William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University
of La Verne in southern California. His works include Psalms for the
21st Century, Mellon Poetry Press, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East
Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, and most
recently in 2010, The Plight of the Palestinians. He can be reached at
wcook@laverne.edu or his website.

Greeley, Colorado - A new race for water is rippling through the drought-scorched heartland, pitting farmers against oil
and gas interests, driven by new drilling techniques that use powerful
streams of water, sand and chemicals to crack the ground and release
stores of oil and gas.

A single such well can require five million gallons of water, and energy
companies are flocking to water auctions, farm ponds, irrigation
ditches and municipal fire hydrants to get what they need.

That thirst is helping to drive an explosion of oil production here, but
it is also complicating the long and emotional struggle over who drinks
and who does not in the arid and fast-growing West. Farmers and
environmental activists say they are worried that deep-pocketed energy
companies will have purchase on increasingly scarce water supplies as
they drill deep new wells that use the technique of hydraulic
fracturing.

And this summer's record-breaking drought, which dried up wells and ruined crops, has only amplified those concerns.

"It's not a level playing field," said Peter V. Anderson, who grows corn
and alfalfa on the parched plains of eastern Colorado. "I don't think
in reality that the farmer can compete with the oil and gas companies
for that water. Their return is a hell of a lot better than ours."

But industry officials say that critics are exaggerating the effect on water supplies.

Energy producers do not - and cannot - simply snap up the rights to
streams and wells at the expense of farmers or homeowners. To fill their
storage tanks, they lease surplus water from cities or buy treated
wastewater that would otherwise be dumped back into rivers. In some
cases, they buy water rights directly from farmers or other users - a
process that in Colorado requires court approval.

"This is an important use of our water - to produce energy, which is
the foundation of all we do," said Tisha Schuller, president of the
Colorado Oil and Gas Association. "Think about the big users of water -
agriculture, industrial development. All these things require energy."

In average years, farmers and ranchers like Mr. Anderson say they pay
about $30 for an acre foot of water - equal to about 326,000 gallons -
a price that can rise to $100 when water is scarce. Right now, oil and
gas companies in parts of Colorado are paying as much as $1,000 to
$2,000 for an equal amount of treated water from city pipes.

That money can be a blessing for strained local utilities and water
departments, but farmers say there is no way they can afford to match
those bids.

"We're not going to be able to raise the food we need," said Ben Rainbolt, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. "How are we going to produce this with less?"

In the spring, during an annual auction of surplus water in northern
Colorado, Mr. Anderson and a handful of other farmers were outbid by
water haulers who supply hydraulic fracturing wells. Although Mr.
Anderson ultimately got the water he needed as bids settled after the
auction, the mere shadow of energy producers at the auction offered a
glimpse of their growing presence in the rush for Western water.

"Energy companies are moving quickly to shore up supplies," said Reagan
Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute at Colorado State
University. "They're going to find it, and they're going to pay what
they need to pay, and it's on an order of magnitude of what crop
producers can afford to pay. That changes the whole deal."

Oil and gas companies estimate that they will use about 6.5 billion
gallons of water in Colorado this year, and that figure makes up only
0.1 percent of overall water use, according to state data. Their
consumption represents more water than is used making snow on the ski
slopes or greening the state's golf courses. But it is paltry compared
with the deluge needed for irrigation and agriculture, which accounts for 85.5 percent of Colorado's water use.

Still, the industry is growing fast. The Colorado Oil and Gas Commission
estimates that the state's oil and gas water needs will grow by 16
percent over the next three years.

"Water flows uphill to money," said Mike Chiropolos, a lawyer for Western Resource Advocates, an environmental group based in Boulder. "It's only going to get more precious and more scarce."

In June, the group released a study
that accused Colorado of underestimating the amount of water used in
hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, saying the true figure was
between 7.2 billion and 13 billion gallons per year - enough to serve
as many as 296,100 people.

Despite the drought and worries about water supplies, several cities -
and even farmers with water to spare - are starting to line up as
eager sellers.

In July, after receiving proposals from several energy companies,
Aurora, a suburb of Denver, approved a $9.5 million deal to lease 2.4
billion gallons of effluent water to the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation
over five years. It did not come from drinking supplies. It was excess
water that "we couldn't capture, couldn't store, couldn't do anything
with," said Greg Baker, a spokesman for the city's water department.

But the agreement - the first of its kind for Aurora - drew stiff rebukes from opponents of hydraulic fracturing.

Opponents said the Anadarko agreement would divert water that would have
flowed to other users along the South Platte River and send it far from
the community. Molly Markert, a city councilwoman who voted against the
lease, said she was uneasy about selling municipal water to energy
companies.

For years, Greeley has leased its surplus water to farmers, construction
companies and others. In 2008, the oil and gas companies started making
offers, said Jon Monson, the city's water and sewer director. Most of
the water still goes to agriculture, but the city rented 1,300 acre feet
to energy companies last year and is on pace to rent 1,800 acre feet -
as much as 586 million gallons - this year.

It is easy math for the city: The farmers pay $30 an acre foot. The oil
and gas companies pay $3,300, which will earn the city's water
department $4 million to $5 million this year.

Precious as water is, Kreg Edrington, 26, spilled only a little one
recent morning as he hooked his tanker truck up to a fire hydrant in
Greeley and opened the tap. Like a herd of thirsty elephants, the
tankers begin lining up early to fill their steel bellies. In less than
15 minutes, Mr. Edrington's tanker was brimming with leased city water,
and he was ready to make the two-hour round trip over gravel roads to a
drilling site, where he would empty the tank and turn around for more.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Why Weird Experiences Boost CreativitySept 10, 2012 | Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.We all have the potential for creativity and there are so many different
triggers that can broaden our minds, inspire, and motivate.

Creative
people think differently. But why? There is no magic bullet or single
pill. We all have the potential for creativity, but there are so many
different triggers that can broaden our minds, inspire, and motivate. Of
course, there are just as many triggers that can shut down our minds.
Since creativity is so important for individual well-being and societal
innovation, it's important that we systematically pull the right
triggers.

A crucial trigger is the experience of unusual and unexpected events.
These events can take many different forms, ranging from the loss a
parent to living abroad. But one need not experience any of these
specific events to think more creatively. In a recent paper in Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, Simone Ritter and colleagues propose
that any life experience, from the traumatic to the joyful, can lead to
flexibility and creativity as long as it diversifies your experiences
and pushes you outside your normal thought patterns.

To test their idea, the researchers put people in a virtual reality
world where participants took a virtual three-minute stroll through the
university cafeteria, and during the course of their walk experienced
weird events that violated the laws of physics. In one event, as people
walked closer to a suitcase standing on a table, the size of the
suitcase decreased, but as they walked away, its size increased. In
another event, people were made to feel as though they were walking
faster than they really were, and in a third event, as people walked
toward a table, a toy car inched closer to a bottle, but when the car
actually hit the bottle, instead of falling to the ground it slowly
moved upwards!

They also had people take a test of cognitive flexibility where they
were required to come up with as many ideas as possible to the question
"What makes sound?" Those who generated a greater variety of categories
were scored as more cognitively flexible. Those who were actively
engaged in the weird virtual-reality world scored higher on the test of
cognitive flexibility than a group of people who engaged in a normal
version of the virtual world, and higher than a group of people who just
watched a film showing the unexpected events. They also found that
their results couldn't be explained by differences in positive or
negative emotion.

In a second experiment they asked participants to prepare a sandwich
with butter and chocolate chips (apparently, this is a breakfast
delicacy in the Netherlands, where the study was conducted). Some people
were told to prepare the sandwich in an unusual order, first putting
chocolate chips on a dish, then buttering the bread, and then placing
the bread buttered-side-down on the dish with the chocolate chips. They
had another group make the sandwich in the usual order, and another
group just watched a video of a person making the sandwich in either the
unusual way or the usual way. Again, people who actively made the
sandwich in the unusual order scored highest in cognitive flexibility
compared with the other groups, and the results couldn't be explained by
differences in positive or negative emotion.

These results are provocative and have some important implications.
While prior research shows that early traumatic life experiences can be
conducive to creativity, thankfully it's not necessary to lose a parent
or experience a physical illness to see the world differently. The core
feature is actively experiencing a violation of how things are supposed
to happen. The results help explain why periods of immigration often
precede extraordinary periods of creative achievement: Immigrants bring
their own customs and ideas to a new environment, diversifying
experiences for everyone.

These results also suggest that if you want to get into a creative
mindset, do your normal routine in a completely different way. Write
with your other hand. Moonwalk backwards on your way to work. Eat
something new for lunch. Smile at strangers. Be weird. With your brain
re-shuffled, you'll be in a better position to be creative.

Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive psychologist specializing in the development of intelligence, creativity, and personality.

America is currently engaged in the most expensive presidential contest
in world history. In the United States, money doesn't just talk - it
dictates. How can we hope to make progress on the path to sustainability
when the road is blocked by barricades of bullion backed by battalions
of billionaires? How do we break through the political gridlock?

Dave Brower's wife, Anne, once put a wise spin on this dilemma. "What we need," she said, is "a cure for greedlock."

Earth's richest 1,000 individuals now control as much wealth as the
poorest 2.5 billion people on the planet. This super elite uses its vast
wealth to control the media, influence politicians, and bend laws to
their favor. In the US, the wealthy dominate our government: 47 percent
of US representatives are millionaires, as are 67 percent of US
senators. The Center for Responsive Politics reports Congressional
wealth has increased 11 percent between 2009 and 2011.

Not only is our economy out of balance with nature, our economy is also
out of balance with the practical limits of physical and fiscal reality.
As the Occupy movement has indelibly framed it, we are now a society
divided not only by haves and have-nots, but we are a nation - and a
world - divided into the 99 percent and the 1 percent.

Imagine if a tree were engineered like the US economy - with half of
its mass centered in the top 10 percent of its height and 40 percent of
its mass concentrated in the very topmost branches. Whether redwood or
oak, such a tree would not be stable in a windstorm. It would be
destined to topple. Of course, nature has better sense.

In 2011, the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) published a report called Outing the Oligarchy
designed to focus public attention on "the ultra-rich individuals who
benefit most from - and are most responsible for - the growing
climate chaos that is destabilizing global ecosystems." It defined them
as "a small elite of powerful billionaires who profit from polluting the
atmosphere by promoting government policies that support an
unsustainable reliance on fossil fuels."

The IFG report illustrated the growing rich-poor gap by visualizing a
parade in which all the residents of Canada ambled down a city street on
a single day. Let's translate that vision to the US.

Imagine if everyone in America was invited to parade down Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington, DC. Imagine if the parade took just one hour.
Imagine if the march began with the poorest people in the lead. Imagine
if all the marchers' income levels were indicated by their height.
Here's what such a parade would look like:

For the first 10 minutes, the lead marchers (those who survive on only a
few thousands dollars a year) look like toddlers, barely a foot tall.
Around 15 minutes into the parade, the marchers are not quite so poor:
They now stand about three feet tall. This tide of half-sized adults
continues for the next 25 minutes. Only after more than two-thirds of
the population has surged down the parade route do we begin to see
normal-sized marchers (those making an average income). For the next 10
minutes or so, the spectacle resembles a normal parade. Then things
start to get really strange.

In the final 10 minutes, we start to see marchers who are wealthier than
average: people who are seven, even eight feet tall. In the last six
minutes, the marchers loom more than 14 feet tall. With 25 seconds left,
the minority of super-rich marchers looks down from a height of more
than 30 feet - nearly six times the size of the average marcher; 30
times the size of those who made up the first quarter of the parade.

In the closing seconds of this parade of wealth, the shoulders of some
marchers extend thousands of feet into the sky - these are the
plutocrats. Finally, bringing up the rear, in the very last second of
the march, are the most powerful and dominant members of the power elite
- a select band of Godzilla-like oligarchs who look down upon
everyone else from an astonishing altitude of 8,000-plus-feet. No wonder
the superrich seem so removed and aloof.

Just like the banking system, when something is "too big to fail" it
becomes a danger to itself and others. Nature would never tolerate such a
system. Nor should we.

You may be surprised by the companies siding with the likes of Monsanto,
Coca-Cola, Nestle, Dow and other behemoths over the right to know what
foods are genetically modified.

Inside the battle over California’s ballot initiative for labeling of genetically engineered foods, Prop 37, is another battle for money. It’s no surprise that more than $14 million of the over $26 million raised to defeat
the “Right to Know” labeling initiative is from the biotech industry.
And it’s not shocking that the nation’s largest food corporations –
PepsiCo, Nestle, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, General Mills, Del Monte, Kellogg,
Hershey, etc. – have kicked in most of the rest.

But then there
are some surprises. Companies with no obvious stake in the GE foods
labeling battle like Morton Salt, Ocean Spray Cranberries, and Godiva
have contributed thousands of dollars. And conscientious shoppers may
not be aware that they are buying organic products from brands owned by
the companies fighting to defeat Prop 37.

The Cornucopia Institute, an organic watchdog organization, recently published an infographic
telling which organic brands are owned by major corporations that
oppose GE food labeling – as well as which organic companies and brands
are supporting the pro-labeling “Right to Know” campaign.

Coca-Cola
might not want to label the genetically engineered corn used to make
the high fructose corn syrup in its sodas, but it also owns organic and
“natural” brands like Honest Tea and Odwalla. Likewise, PepsiCo, owner
of Izze and Naked Juice, donated $1.7 million to oppose Prop 37 – more
than every other donor except Monsanto and DuPont, and even more than
the other four major biotech corporations (Bayer, BASF, Dow, and
Syngenta).

By
publishing this information, the Cornucopia Institute made quite a wave.
“It's amazing how many emails we've gotten from people saying, ‘I never
knew that Kellogg owned Kashi!’ They feel betrayed,” said co-founder
Mark Kastel. He adds that consumers might have been in the dark because,
“You'll never see General Mills on the label of Glen Muir or Cascadian
Farms, you'll see Small Planet Foods,” a practice he finds deceptive.

“People
aren't just buying the organic cereal, the organic frozen vegetables,”
he continues. “They are buying the story behind the food, and organics
has always had this romantic story about stewarding the environment and
humane animal husbandry, and one of the reasons consumers assume organic
food is more expensive is because economic justice for the farmer is
built into the price.” He accuses large corporations with disingenuous
organic brands of “farming by press release,” adding that, “It's a lot
easier to build a fancy press release and tell how much of your power
comes from wind power than it is to deal with many small, family
farmers.”

But Cornucopia doesn’t identify itself as
“anti-corporate.” Kastel says, “These issues aren't about corporate
scale, they are about corporate ethics.” The infographic supports this
by identifying a number of organic companies and brands that have
donated to the Right to Know campaign, supporting Prop 37 and the
labeling of GE foods. These include: Nature’s Path, Amy’s, Annie’s, Dr.
Bronners, Nutiva, and more. In fact, since the infographic was initially
released, he says some companies have donated to support Prop 37 and
then asked Cornucopia to add them to the infographic.

Honest Tea,
which was acquired by Coca Cola in 2011, assures customers that it
retains 100 percent autonomy, even though its owner is one of the
biggest funders of No on Prop 37. Honest Tea points to its own organic
certification, its voluntary labeling of its products as free of
genetically engineered ingredients, and even its funding of the federal
labeling effort, the Just Label It campaign, as evidence of its
commitment to the labeling of genetically engineered foods and its
independence from its parent company.

The Just Label It campaign,
funded by Honest Tea, Horizon Organic, Annie’s, Amy’s, Organic Valley,
Stonyfield, and others, focuses its efforts on convincing the FDA to
require labeling on all GE foods nationally. Honest Tea says it funds
Just Label It but not the pro-Prop 37 Right to Know campaign because it
feels the best use of its limited funds is focusing on the national
campaign. According to the company, it does not have the funds to devote
to smaller, more limited, statewide efforts around the country.

The
Right to Know campaign’s co-chair, Dave Murphy, disagrees with this
logic. “California is the eighth largest economy in the world,” he says,
noting the impact that requiring labeling in this one state will have.
Additionally, he lacks faith that the FDA, which has opposed requiring
labels of GE foods to date, will be swayed in the near future. On the
other hand, a majority of California voters (and a majority of
Americans) support GE food labeling, and the ballot measure has a real
chance of passing. That said, Murphy is adamant that he does not wish
for anyone to boycott any organic products, no matter what their parent
company is up to. “That will only hurt the farmers,” he says.

Kastel
– a man not known for mincing his words – uses stronger language,
calling Just Label It a “damage control scheme” that organic giants set
up during a time when they were criticized for agreeing with the USDA’s
call for “coexistence” between organics and GE crops. “Their kneejerk
response was to thump their chest about how anti-GMO they are.” He adds,
“Just Label It accomplished nothing and it never will. As long as we
have the campaign finance system we have, it never will.”

The
Cornucopia Institute hopes to add a “Missing in Action” section to its
infographic, calling out the enormous corporations that have not donated
to either side of Prop 37. That list will include Hain Celestial,
Stonyfield and Whole Foods. “We're hoping there will be some level of
embarrassment,” he says.

Stonyfield’s director of organic and sustainable agriculture, Britt Lundgren, ensures customers that it has endorsed Prop 37.
“Although our financial donations have been solely to Just Label It, we
support all efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered
foods,” she said. “We believe that consumers have a right to know what's
in their food and that genetically engineered ingredients are
fundamentally different from their non-genetically engineered
counterparts and people have a right to make a decision about whether or
not they want to consume those foods.”

Ad

So why the choice to fund
one and not the other? “Stonyfield invested in supporting Just Label It
long before the idea of having a California ballot initiative came to
our attention so we made that decision and we invested our funds there,”
Lundgren explains. “We only have so much money that we could put toward
these things, unfortunately.”

Unfortunately, even though Prop 37 is now polling at 65 percent
support, its passage is by no means a slam dunk. So far the campaign in
support of labeling has raised $4.5 million, but needs $6 million to
$10 million just to try and compete with other side's deep pockets. And
money counts, as illustrated by a failed California ballot initiative to
tax cigarettes and use the proceeds to fund cancer research that the
state voted on in June. It received 67 percent support in March 2012 – before tobacco companies spent nearly $50 million to fight it. By Election Day, June 5, the measure lost narrowly.

It
is certain that the food and biotech industries will bury the Prop 37
campaign in a flood of corporate cash. But what is not yet known is
whether the Right to Know campaign will receive the resources to counter
that cash in time for the election on November 6.

We're only a little more than three months away from the imaginary 2012 End of Times (based on silly misinterpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar). The 2012 doom and gloom folks have glommed
onto all kinds of nonsensical predictions where the Milky Way galaxy
disrupts us: the passage of the solar system across the galactic plane,
or a supposed "grand alignment" with the galactic center will trigger a
mysterious and nondescript celestial 'force.'

In reality, our Milky Way really does pose numerous hazards to
Earth during the sun's orbital journey around the galactic center. But
no future space disaster can be circled on a calendar on Dec. 21 or any
other date.

The sun has completed 20 orbits of the galactic hub since Earth formed. Each orbit is called a galactic year -- a vast stretch of time (220 million Earth years) that the Mayans could have never
imagined. Whatever cosmic catastrophes might have happened along the
way, it has not prevented complex life from arising and evolving on
Earth over roughly the past three galactic years. There have
been attempts at statistically linking mysterious mass extinctions to
cosmic disasters, but we simply don't have enough data, says Colin
Norman the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

The reality is that the potential of navigational hazards along our
galactic journey lie far into the future over many millions or billions
of years. Our distant descendants could come up with strategies to guard
against some of these mishaps. However, the biggest threat is from
extremely rare energetic events in the galaxy, says Norman.

Killer catastrophes were much more frequent in the
Milky Way's formative period, billions of years before Earth was born.
Stars were being made at such a voracious rate -- and then quickly
exploding -- that the galaxy would have been made uninhabitable by the
radiation saturation, says Norman.

This is sobering because we suspect there could be ancient Methuselah planets
in the galaxy that might have formed 12 billion years ago (as opposed
to Earth's 4.5 billion year birthday). But they would have been
sterilized of life by radiation from multiple supernova and hot stellar
winds from giant stars.

Over time there have been 1 billion supernovae in our galaxy. They
accelerate cosmic rays that irradiate any nearby star systems. Even more
devastating are so-called Quimby events.
These are an unusual class of extraordinarily powerful supernova that
defy conventional explanations for their power generation. It's
hypothesized that these super-blasts only happen in very rare stars that
are over 100 times the mass of our sun. There could have been 10
million of these popping off in our galaxy to date.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Food prices are rising, and consumers are feeling it. Rising food
prices aren’t only hitting America, they are happening around the world.
Costs have gone up 10 percent between June and July alone, with corn,
soybeans, and wheat reaching record prices. This outpaces the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s estimate of a 6 percent
increase.

Rising Food Prices and Vulnerable Populations

While we may all see small changes in the grocery store and in grocery bills,
World Bank president Jim Yong Kim says countries reliant on imported
grains, especially “Africa and the Middle East are particularly
vulnerable.”

The World Bank attributes the price jump mainly to the American
heatwave and drought in Eastern Europe, which has hurt corn and soy in
the US and wheat in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Use of corn in the
production of ethanol in the U.S.—accounting for up to 40 percent of
corn crop—has also been blamed for the price jump.

But of course this isn’t the beginning of rising food prices. Costs have been going up for some time now; you can see a food price index we
covered around just last Thanksgiving. The food index count, which is
an overall score reflecting the total price of the top 6 food
commodities, rose to 215 in December of 2010 — up from 90 in the year
2000. Sugar spearheaded the spike, hitting only 2 points away from the
400 mark in December of 2010.

Rice is the only staple that has actually decreased in price (by 4 percent).

G20 Unsympathetic to Those in Need

“We cannot allow these historic price hikes to turn into a lifetime
of perils as families take their children out of school and eat less
nutritious food to compensate for the high prices,” Jim Yong Kim added.

The World Bank is pushing governments to protect at-risk communities,
but the G20 group of leading economic powerhouses is waiting until the
USDA reveals September estimates for the year’s harvest. Aid group Oxfam
decries the “wait and see” approach, but likely to little avail.

Monsanto and Subsidized Farmers

There’s some epic irony at work when Mother Nature wreaks havoc on
genetically modified corn, soy, and beet root which have been slowly
poisoning consumers for the last decade. Unfortunately, her work also
hurts organic farmers trying, as we all are, to desperately make a
living.

Millions worldwide will go hungry as food prices rise, but crop
insurance will help out subsidized farmers—many of them being the very
ones growing Monsanto crops endorsed by the US government.
And who pays for up to 60 percent of insured crops, including GMO and
pesticide-riddled varieties? The average taxpayer. So, we have that to
think about, too, when we pay a little more for our daily bread.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

With the successful landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, NASA scientists
will have new opportunities for discovery on the Martian surface. But
will investigators be willing to question longstanding assumptions?

Friday, September 7, 2012

Joe Kiernan is a resident of North Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, and
he regularly sees mysterious lights in the sky. We talk with Joe about
the strange activity in his area. We also talk about a fireball UFO in
North Carolina, an upcoming event where military men will talk about
UFOs, plus other space and UFO news on this episode of Spacing Out!

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